Reminder: Technical Advice IRC meeting this week **(Wednesday) 4-5 pm UTC**
on #wikimedia-tech.
Question can be asked in English, German & Romanian.
⏰ Please note: due to summer time change this week will be the last meeting
at 4 pm UTC. Beginning with next week the meeting will start at 3 pm! ⏰
The Technical Advice IRC Meeting is a weekly support event for volunteer
developers. Every Wednesday, two full-time developers are available to help
you with all your questions about Mediawiki, gadgets, tools and more! This
can be anything from "how to get started" over "who would be the best
contact for X" to specific questions on your project.
If you know already what you would like to discuss or ask, please add your
topic to the next meeting:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Advice_IRC_Meeting
Hope to see you there!
Michi (for the Technical Advice IRC Meeting crew)
--
Michael F. Schönitzer
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de
Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissens der Menschheit
teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
Hello everyone,
The Wikimedia Cloud Services team has been working for the past year to
upgrade the entire Toolforge infrastructure to the Debian Stretch operating
system. You may recognize Toolforge from the "tools.wmflabs.org" domain. We
were required to move away from the old operating system, Ubuntu Trusty, as
the Ubuntu upstream developers set an end-of-life date of 31 March for
Trusty.[0] After this point, we cannot use Ubuntu Trusty on our servers, as
it would not be considered secure. The deadline was thus a hard deadline.
A bit on how Toolforge works: the Wikimedia projects have a community of
volunteer software developers who work on tools that help Wikimedians in
their work. You have probably used at least one such tool. They are so
important for our productivity, but they are the best efforts of
volunteers, and do not have service level agreements[1] or other
guarantees. And sometimes, volunteers move on to other projects (they're
volunteers after all) and so the tools basically run themselves until they
stop for some reason.
Toolforge is designed to encourage as much collaborative maintenance as
possible, including by requiring tools to be open source. We also sent
ample notifications to tool maintainers via their email addresses on file
including instructions on how to upgrade. In the final two weeks, we sent
daily notifications.
Despite our best efforts, there were around 385 holdouts when we shut down
the Ubuntu Trusty job grid.[2] They have not been deleted, but they are no
longer running. This includes tools that are widely used by members of the
community. It could also include tools that no one has used in years and no
one will miss. I am not sure which is which, but what I do know is that
lots of people use lots of tools on lots of wikis.
I need your help. If you see community members on village pumps, social
media, etc. asking about tools that have gone down (especially if they
involve "tools.wmflabs.org"), please forward them on to me at
jhare(a)wikimedia.org. You are free to respond yourself using information in
this email and anything else you know, of course. If it is at all possible,
I would like to build a report on how many complaints there are around
this. This will help me advocate for the community, because I think it
would be really cool if we could have fewer of these jarring transitions in
the future.
Please review the list.[2] Some of these might have already been migrated
to the new operating system. If you recognize a tool on the list and think
people might want to hear about what happened, do feel free to proactively
notify people you think should be notified. I'm also happy to write
something for Tech News if you think that would be helpful. Unfortunately,
the Cloud Services team is not equipped to resurrect individual tools; we
cannot guarantee they will work on the new OS due to operating system
runtime differences (different versions of Python, etc).
Thank you for your help, if you are available to provide it.
My best regards,
James Hare
[0] So why Debian Stretch and not Ubuntu Xenial? Because the Wikimedia
Foundation decided to consolidate around Debian GNU/Linux in 2014 or so,
and the Ubuntu Trusty VMs on Cloud Services were the last holdouts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement
[2] https://tools.wmflabs.org/trusty-tools/
--
*James Hare* (he/him)
Associate Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
//sorry for cross-posting
This week’s train will add a new option to the user preferences: People
with rollback rights can add a confirmation prompt to their rollback links,
if they want to.
While most people with rollback rights want to use them to revert vandalism
quickly, some people prefer a confirmation prompt. Contributors from German
Wikipedia have asked for this, because quite a lot of people on dewiki
accidentally click on the rollback link, e.g. when they want to thank
someone. But there are also people in other wikis who use various methods
to prevent themselves from accidentally rolling back.
Wikimedia Germany’s Technical Wishes team[1] has now built a confirmation
prompt that works inline, like the thanks notification.
- On German Wikipedia, the confirmation prompt for rollbacks will be
activated as a default. Users who want to rollback quickly can turn it off
individually in their user settings.[2]
- In most wikis, this confirmation prompt will be switched off by
default. In these wikis, you can turn it on individually if you want to.
[3]
The planned deployment date for the confirmation prompt is March 26-28 on
all wikis except dewiki. Please see the project page for more
information.[4] Feedback is always welcome on the central feedback page.[5]
Best,
Johanna
for the Technical Wishes team
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes
[2]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Einstellungen#mw-prefsection-rendering
[3] e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Rollback
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Rollback
--
Project Manager Community Communications Technical Wishlist, Wikimedia
Deutschland
// Sorry for cross-posting!
Reminder: Technical Advice IRC meeting this week **Wednesday 3-4 pm UTC**
on #wikimedia-tech.
Questions can be asked in English and German!
The Technical Advice IRC Meeting (TAIM) is a weekly support event for
volunteer developers. Every Wednesday, two full-time developers are
available to help you with all your questions about Mediawiki, gadgets,
tools and more! This can be anything from "how to get started" over "who
would be the best contact for X" to specific questions on your project.
If you know already what you would like to discuss or ask, please add your
topic to the next meeting:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Advice_IRC_Meeting
Hope to see you there!
Johanna (for the Technical Advice IRC Meeting crew)
Hello,
as I understand there is currently ongoing development to create a new
renderer for PDF versions of wiki pages.
Development is ongoing since August 2018 according to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality
as I also understand nothing has been deployed on any Wiki yet.
as I also understand the new rendered is based on mwlib.
as I also understand mwlib does not work with Python 3 according to
https://mwlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html
> It will /not/ work with python versions >= 3 or < 2.6.
as I also understand Python 2 will not receive any security updates from
1st January 2020 according to
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/#update
> Being the last of the 2.x series, 2.7 will have an extended period of
> maintenance. Specifically, 2.7 will receive bugfix support until
> January 1, 2020. After the last release, 2.7 will receive no support.
as I understand concluding from the above the new renderer will be
decommissioned on 1st January 2020
which I don't understand as you will certainly understand.
Yours Dirk
Hello,
The Anti-Harassment Tools team is ready to deploy Partial blocks
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/Partial_blocks>
to more Wikimedia Foundation wikis. 1
Improvements to Special:Block allow administrators to block a user off of a
specific page (or group of pages) or a specific namespace (or group of
namespaces.)
Let me know if you want to start a discussion on your wiki about
introducing partial blocks at this early stage while we are making the
final decisions about the design and functionality of this version. Your
wiki can give our team feedback that will inform these improvements.
Sydney Poore
1 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/Partial_blocks
--
Sydney Poore (she/her)
Strategist, Community health
Wikimedia Foundation
Trust and Safety team;
Anti-harassment tools team
Hi,
Over the past years, Wikimedia Germany’s Technical Wishes team has been
working on new and improved tools for the diverse communities and users of
the Wikimedia projects. Apart from developing software, we also developed
methods and approaches for building software in a collaborative
environment. We learned lots and wrote the most important parts of it down.
So, if you’re interested in software development that involves a diverse
community, please have a look at our white paper. It is version 1.1 of the
paper we published in December 2018.
You can find it on Meta wiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Approach/Lessons_lear…
and a PDF version on Wikimedia Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_Paper_Technical_Wishes_2018.p…
We hope you’ll find our shared learnings helpful. If you have any
questions, please reach out to us on this talk page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Approach/Lessons…
For the Technical Wishes team of Wikimedia Germany
Birgit, Michi, Lea and Johanna
--
Johanna Strodt
Project manager community communication for the Technical Wishlist
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de
Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissens der Menschheit
teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.